AngelFall by Susan Ee

I received this book free through Goodreads First Reads. This has no impact on my thoughts or feelings for this book.

Goodreads Summary:

It's been six weeks since angels of the apocalypse descended to demolish the modern world. Street gangs rule the day while fear and superstition rule the night. When warrior angels fly away with a helpless little girl, her seventeen-year-old sister Penryn will do anything to get her back.

Anything, including making a deal with an enemy angel.

Raffe is a warrior who lies broken and wingless on the street. After eons of fighting his own battles, he finds himself being rescued from a desperate situation by a half-starved teenage girl.

Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they have only each other to rely on for survival. Together, they journey toward the angels' stronghold in San Francisco where she'll risk everything to rescue her sister and he'll put himself at the mercy of his greatest enemies for the chance to be made whole again.

My Thoughts:

I admit I received this book a while ago. I read the first chapter or two and then put it down. I wasn't in the mood for what I thought would be yet another run of the mill post apocalyptic teen girl hero story. Which this book does have some of that, but it has some other elements which made it stand out for me once I gave it a real chance. I read this book in its entirety in one day. Part of that is it is a really fast read, the other part is my curiosity of where this story would go.

Penryn is the stereotypical I didn't choose this I just want to be normal hero of the story. What I like about her is her faults. For instance he accidentally throws a rock at the person trying to help her. She just had bad aim. Which if this book were real I suspect things like that would happen more often, as real people don't always hit their mark.

Raffe is the totally hot totally broody angel who lost his wings. I don't hold that against him too much. He isn't an overbearing douche trying to control Penryn which is often the case in these books. I like that he bets on her and leaves her to fight her own fights.

Penryn's family is of course a broken family. Mom is craycray and little sister is in a wheelchair. The mental illness of Mom is interesting in that in a lot of ways the craycray are better equipped to handle life with angels trying to kill you. Her insanity if finally a strength rather than a weakness. Now little sister gave me nightmares after what happened to her. She is part of the book that totally creeped me out and I wasn't expecting the hair on the back of my neck to get the wiggins. I won't go into too much detail but mad doctors are doing things to angels and humans alike which is bad news bears. I don't read many books that could be considered scary sauce so I am probably extra sensitive to creepy concepts. I don't watch horror movies either and this would fit right in with a horror movie.

So overall, I would recommend this book to fans of the genre and maybe horror fans but note that the creepy stuff is much later in the book and I am a wuss. I would say that it was a fast and entertaining read, so if you want something that meets that criteria I would recommend this one. 

While writing this review I was listening to Giles sing from the Buffy musical episode.